Elastic Container Instance (ECI) release notes list the features released in each month, together with the reference topics that document them. This topic covers releases from 2023 onwards and lists only the months in which a feature was released.
The References (ECI console and API) and References (Kubernetes) columns list the reference topics for each feature on that interface. Three placeholders appear in these columns:
Not supported — The feature is not available on this interface.
Not applicable — The feature is documented for the other interface, and this interface has no separate reference topic for it.
No new reference. Previously supported. — The feature shipped in an earlier release, and this release adds no reference topic for it.
2024
July 2024
Feature name | Description | Release date | References (ECI console and API) | References (Kubernetes) |
Force delete ECI instances | Force-delete an ECI instance to release its resources immediately, without waiting for the graceful termination period. | 2024-07-01 | Not applicable | |
Customize the maximum Pending duration | The maximum Pending duration for an ECI pod, which is 4 hours by default, can be customized. The system automatically terminates pods that exceed the specified duration, which helps avoid unnecessary costs from unhandled abnormal pods. | 2024-07-01 | Not supported |
June 2024
Feature name | Description | Release date | References (ECI console and API) | References (Kubernetes) |
Custom DNS | Configure an ECI pod to use a private Domain Name System (DNS) to resolve internal domain names. This applies to hybrid cloud scenarios in which containers pull images from a private image repository or access internal domain names. | 2024-06-28 | Not supported | |
Manage ECI resources using tags | The TagResources, ListTagResources, and UntagResources API operations can now be called to manage tags on ECI resources. | 2024-06-20 | Not applicable | |
Instance family and generation filters support 8th-generation instance families | When you create an ECI pod by specifying or excluding Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance families or generations, you can now specify or exclude 8th-generation instance families. | 2024-06-20 | Not supported | |
ecs.t6 and ecs.t5 instance families are no longer supported | When you create an ECI instance by specifying an ECS instance type, you can no longer specify burstable instance types, which are the ecs.t6 and ecs.t5 instance families. | 2024-06-04 |
May 2024
Feature name | Description | Release date | References (ECI console and API) | References (Kubernetes) |
General-purpose instances are available | When you create an ECI instance by specifying the number of vCPUs and memory size, you can now also specify a computing power category. For high-performance workloads, select the general-purpose instance type. | 2024-05-31 | ||
New CloudMonitor metrics for GPUs and volumes | When you use CloudMonitor to monitor ECI instances, you can now view metrics for GPUs and volumes. | 2024-05-23 |
April 2024
Feature name | Description | Release date | References (ECI console and API) | References (Kubernetes) |
Security context supports modifying kernel.shm_rmid_forced | When you configure a security context, the supported sysctl parameters now include kernel.shm_rmid_forced. | 2024-04-23 | ||
Switch GPU driver versions | When you create a GPU-accelerated ECI instance by using OpenAPI, you can now switch the GPU driver version. | 2024-04-15 | No new reference. Previously supported. | |
Instance family and generation filters support the g5ne instance family | When you create an ECI pod by specifying or excluding ECS instance families or generations, you can now specify or exclude the g5ne instance family. | 2024-04-08 | Not supported |
January 2024
Feature name | Description | Release date | References (ECI console and API) | References (Kubernetes) |
ecs.c8i, ecs.c8a, and ecs.g8i instance families are supported | When you create an ECI instance by specifying an ECS instance type, you can now specify the ecs.c8i, ecs.c8a, and ecs.g8i instance families. | 2024-01-25 |
2023
December 2023
Feature name | Description | Release date | References (ECI console and API) | References (Kubernetes) |
Economy instances are available | When you create an ECI instance by specifying the number of vCPUs and memory size, you can now specify the Economy computing power category for instance types with 0.25 to 8 vCPUs to reduce costs. | 2023-12-29 | ||
Ignore the NotReady status of sidecar containers | When you use a sidecar container to simulate a DaemonSet, you can set an environment variable to ignore the NotReady status of the sidecar container. Otherwise, the pod becomes NotReady when the sidecar container is NotReady. | 2023-12-29 | Not applicable | |
Create an ECI pod after ClusterIP synchronization is complete | The creation of an ECI pod can be deferred until ClusterIP synchronization is complete, which prevents container timeouts caused by unsynchronized ClusterIPs. ECI pods and the service synchronization component start in parallel, so in a cluster with many services and endpoints, a pod may fail to access a service whose ClusterIP is not yet synchronized. | 2023-12-29 | Not applicable | Configure an ECI pod to be created after ClusterIP synchronization |
New ECI instance types are available | When you create an ECI instance by specifying the number of vCPUs and the memory size, you can now select instance types with 2 to 8 vCPUs and memory options with small increments in some regions. | 2023-12-27 |
November 2023
Feature name | Description | Release date | References (ECI console and API) | References (Kubernetes) |
Force terminate a sidecar container and ignore its exit code | When you use a sidecar container to simulate a DaemonSet, you can set an environment variable to mark the container as a sidecar and ignore its exit code. This ensures that a Job-class pod can run to completion. | 2023-11-30 | Not applicable | Force terminate a Sidecar container and ignore its exit code |
October 2023
Feature name | Description | Release date | References (ECI console and API) | References (Kubernetes) |
ecs.gn7s instance family is supported | When you create a GPU-accelerated instance by specifying an ECS GPU instance type, you can now specify the ecs.gn7s instance family. | 2023-10-17 | ||
Encrypt temporary storage space | If your images and business data contain sensitive information and must meet compliance requirements, you can enable encryption for temporary storage space. Encryption ensures data security and integrity, and prevents unauthorized access and data breaches. | 2023-10-16 | Not supported |
September 2023
Feature name | Description | Release date | References (ECI console and API) | References (Kubernetes) |
Create ECI instances by specifying ECS instance types in the ECI console | When you create an ECI instance in the ECI console, you can now specify an ECS instance type to meet special requirements, such as GPUs or high clock speeds. | 2023-09-13 | Not applicable |
August 2023
Feature name | Description | Release date | References (ECI console and API) | References (Kubernetes) |
Set the startup and shutdown order of containers | Add environment variables to set startup and shutdown priorities for the containers in an ECI instance, so that the containers start and shut down in a specified order. | 2023-08-22 | ||
Data cache | Create a data cache (DataCache) to pull business data with a large data volume, such as training models, in advance and cache it locally. Mount the cached data when you create an ECI instance to reduce instance startup time, avoid repeated downloads, and save costs. | 2023-08-21 | ||
Instance family and generation filters support the u1 instance family | When you create an ECI pod by specifying or excluding ECS instance families or generations, you can now specify or exclude the ecs.u1 instance family. | 2023-08-18 | Not supported | |
Specify a private IP address | Specify a private IP address when you create an ECI instance. | 2023-08-14 | ||
Modify vm.min_free_kbytes | When you configure a security context to modify sysctl parameters, you can now modify vm.min_free_kbytes. Setting vm.min_free_kbytes to more than 20% of the total memory is not recommended. | 2023-08-10 | ||
Monitor ECI instances using CloudMonitor | Use CloudMonitor to monitor ECI instances. | 2023-08-04 | ||
Zone-based distribution or affinity scheduling | In Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) Pro clusters or Pro Edition ACK serverless clusters, you can use native Kubernetes scheduling semantics to schedule a distributed task across zones or to specified zones. Spread the task across zones to meet high availability (HA) deployment requirements, or deploy it in specified zones to meet high-performance deployment requirements. | 2023-08-03 | Not supported | Implement zone-based distribution or affinity scheduling for ECI pods |
July 2023
Feature name | Description | Release date | References (ECI console and API) | References (Kubernetes) |
Passwordless pulling of ACR images across accounts | If a Container Registry (ACR) instance and the ECI instance that you want to create belong to different Alibaba Cloud accounts, you can configure Resource Access Management (RAM) to enable passwordless image pulling. | 2023-07-19 | ||
Refined log collection for standard output | For standard output, you can now set the log collection path to one of the following values:
| 2023-07-18 | ||
Modify net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range | When you configure a security context to modify sysctl parameters, you can now modify net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range. | 2023-07-04 |
June 2023
Feature name | Description | Release date | References (ECI console and API) | References (Kubernetes) |
Specify a GPU driver version | Add an annotation to specify the driver version for a GPU-accelerated ECI pod. Different workloads may require different driver and Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) versions. | 2023-06-30 | Not supported | |
u1 instance family is supported | When you create an ECI instance by specifying an ECS instance type, you can now specify the ecs.u1 instance family. | 2023-06-20 | ||
Enable fixed IP addresses | When you create an ECI instance, you can enable a fixed IP address for the instance. After the instance is released, the system retains the fixed IP address for the validity period, which is 48 hours by default, and assigns it to a new instance that meets specific conditions. | 2023-06-09 | ||
Specify multiple security groups | The k8s.aliyun.com/eci-security-group annotation now supports multiple security groups.
| 2023-06-05 | Not supported |
May 2023
Feature name | Description | Release date | References (ECI console and API) | References (Kubernetes) |
Elastic assurance is supported | Elastic assurance provides resource certainty for pay-as-you-go resources. If your business requires a specific number of ECI pods of a particular ECS instance type during a specific period, purchasing elastic assurance is recommended to ensure resource availability and prevent creation failures caused by insufficient inventory. | 2023-05-17 | Not supported | Use a private resource pool with elastic assurance to create a pod |
New vCPU and memory specifications are available | The following vCPU and memory specifications are now available:
| 2023-05-11 | ||
Automatically convert spot ECI pods to pay-as-you-go ECI pods when inventory is insufficient | When you create a spot ECI pod, you can add the | 2023-05-09 | Not supported |
March 2023
Feature name | Description | Release date | References (ECI console and API) | References (Kubernetes) |
Virtual nodes support clusterDNS, clusterDomain, and customResources | When you create or update a virtual node, you can add parameters to configure customResources, clusterDNS, and clusterDomain. | 2023-03-28 | Not applicable | Applies only to self-managed clusters: Common VNodectl commands |
Instance family filter | When you create an ECI pod by specifying the number of vCPUs and memory size, you can now add the | 2023-03-07 | Not supported | Create a pod by specifying or excluding ECS instance families |
Instance generation filter | When you create an ECI pod by specifying the number of vCPUs and memory size, you can now add the | 2023-03-07 | Not supported | Create a pod by specifying or excluding ECS instance generations |
Customize hosts | Add the k8s.aliyun.com/eci-custom-hosts annotation to customize the hosts of an ECI pod, such as to specify the IP address of a self-managed image repository. | 2023-03-03 | Not supported | |
ARM instances are supported | An ARM instance can be created by specifying an ARM instance type. ARM instance types are based on the ARM architecture, in which each vCPU corresponds to a physical processor core and provides stable performance and exclusive resources. | 2023-03-03 |